Architecture Article

When people think of Argentina, they often picture landmarks like the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Yet the country spans over 2,780,400 km², making it one of the largest in South America and home to a wide range of landscapes and realities that frequently go unnoticed. In fact, the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina lies within the Lithium Triangle: a high-altitude region shared with Bolivia and Chile that contains roughly 54% of the world’s lithium reserves. Within this territory sits the Olaroz Salt Flat, a site where today two competing dynamics converge: the expansion of industrial lithium extraction and the preservation of ancestral culture and lands inhabited by Kolla and Atacama communities, creating a clash of high-capacity industrial extraction and traditional, low-impact agrarian practices.

Nestled in the serene landscape of Sethumadai, Tamil Nadu on a four-acre plot, this architectural project responds directly to its unique context, bordered by the Anamalai range to the south & east and vast peanut fields to the north. The primary objective was to transform a 4-acre site in a sensitive wildlife corridor into a Wildlife Viewing Retreat designed to facilitate the quiet act of creation while honouring the ancient, rhythmic movements of the forest’s inhabitants.

A building designed by Minoru Yamasaki in downtown Minneapolis is set to be converted into a hotel, marking a new phase in the life of the former headquarters of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company, one of the architect’s lesser-known yet formally distinctive works. Vacant since 2023, the building at 20 Washington Avenue South is now the subject of an adaptive reuse proposal that aims to introduce hospitality and public-facing functions. Initial plans were presented in April 2026, outlining a transformation of the structure while retaining its defining architectural features. The project is expected to move forward pending approvals, with a projected opening targeted for 2028.

Cemeteries are sites containing the quiet presence of memories and the constancy of cultural rituals; this combination poignantly defines a sense of bodily transference through atmospheric quietude. The Ankaran Cemetery embodies these qualities—their significance and their constancy. Furthermore, the architecture of the cemetery is conceived as a liminal transition space between the verticality of the adjacent forest and the limitlessness of the Adriatic horizon to the southwest. The space of the cemetery is defined by these contrasting relationships and transitions between open and closed, light and dark – between the here and the hereafter.

Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV has announced a new milestone in the development of its Tour & Taxis Towers, a mixed-use project in Brussels, Belgium. The design was commissioned by real estate investor and developer Nextensa in 2021, within the framework of a site-specific land use masterplan also designed by MVRDV. The two-tower project combines offices, housing, and public amenities across 58,000 m², forming a landmark in the neighbourhood and reaching 126 metres at its highest point. Recently granted construction permission, the project is designed to reduce embodied carbon through the use of a hybrid structure and lightweight façade elements, aiming to minimize the use of concrete in both the structure and foundations. From the early stages, the firm has employed its CarbonSpace software to guide these decisions.

There is an ancestral gesture in shaping earth. Long before architecture was established as a discipline, clay was already being molded by hand and transformed by fire, turning raw matter into domestic utensils and cultural objects. Within the history of this craft, ceramic factories mark the transition from manual knowledge to serial production, expanding its scale without entirely severing its material origins. Scattered across different territories, these structures record the relationship between technique, landscape, and time. Over the decades, however, many of them lost their original function, replaced by more technological processes or absorbed by the urban development around them, entering an intermediate state between permanence and obsolescence.

On the banks of the Sanya Haitang River, where tides ebb and flow, the climate is warm, and islands, coconut groves, and dense mangroves unfold in layers. Here, on the wetlands of Haitang Bay, we have woven an organic waterfront village. The Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji believed that “fudo (wind and earth) is a comprehensive term for climate, geology, soil, sightlines, and landscape.” Thus, we respond to the fudo with a continuous village and an undulating roof. The silver rooftop interpenetrates with the lush greenery, intertwining the calm of metal with the abundance of the tropics. The architecture maintains a humble empathy with nature, while the vast shadows it casts care for and shelter the people and life along the water’s edge.

Ramsden is a home for a young family assembled from fragments of memory. The design was heavily influenced by The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, a reflective travelogue with no conventional plot, yet densely layered with personal and international histories. The work reveals the complexity and disorder inherent in individual relationships to history, culture, and the past.